


Collecting Shells on the Beach

by superhiki



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Gen, It's not really shipping if someone is braindead right?, Post End of Evangelion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2013-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-23 01:19:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/920317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superhiki/pseuds/superhiki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shinji wanders the post 3rd Impact world alone when his wounds are most fresh. Investigating the Mass Production Evangelions scattered along the desolate landscape yields interesting, but terrifying, results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collecting Shells on the Beach

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Questions the worth of life in an altered state, pushes moral boundaries and- well, it's Evangelion... Also my knowledge of canon is rusty, so however I justified this fic when I wrote it has kind of been lost in the shuffle. Hopefully it won't irritate those super schooled in Eva lore, but if it does I'm open to criticism and fact checking.

There were no words to describe the condition planet Earth was left in after 3rd Impact. Refuse littered the city. Most of what Shinji Ikari had seen, however, barely qualified to be called a ‘city’. The ground was black but not burned and the oceans were red but tasted stale, neither salty nor fresh. The ruins of civilization the day before seemed aged thousands of years past humanity, it seemed impossible that days, hours beforehand there were people walking around. The shock Shinji received numbed his mind, for once it was not racing with thoughts of how insignificant he was. Instead the only soul alive pushed its body forward and through the dismal landscape. 

There was no smell or taste to anything. No sound apart from his own foot steps and the distant crashing of waves. No wind or clouds or shadows, reality was a giant Ganzfeld experiment. If Shinji were to lie still he might begin seeing the illusion of an old world, one with people and sounds. That was a lie, sometimes there were sounds that came from more than the soles of his feet. 

One day, night, perhaps morning, the sounds of shifting earth and a distant crash awoke Shinji. With absolutely nothing left to do, the teenager set out to investigate. A plume of black dirt told Shinji which way to go and with nothing but Misato’s cross still clutched in his hand, he was off.

There seemed to be no semblance of night and day on the new Earth and Shinji worried that he might freeze or burn to death if Earth’s rotation had somehow halted. The moon was still traveling across the sky and changing like it always had, sometimes casting the stain of Rei’s, if that was indeed Rei’s, blood into shadow. No matter where the moon was though, Shinji’s world was in a regular state of dim light, like a constant full moon was shining and catching on the red ocean, bleeding onto the world and dulling the edges of convenience store signs and scattered clothes. Green and blue did not exist, just grey. 

Shinji looked up after a rather perilous leap over a deep red puddle to see the arm of one of the Mass Productions Evas shooting straight up into the air. This must have been the cause of the sound as, last he checked, all the Evas were erect and frozen in their crucifix pose. Over a hill climbed the teen until he could see the entire machine. He shook his head, it wasn’t a machine, it was something else. Everyone who could have told him the truth behind SEELE and NERV and the Evangelion series were gone and Shinji was left with little information. 

He climbed down the mountain of rubbish, which turned out to be the shattered remains of a hospital, and drew close to the fallen Eva. What had those things become? Its whole body was fractured and the petrified remains of Rei’s face were only recognizable by the vacant smile on its broken lips. Shinji circled its front a few times, unnerved by the expression on the creature’s dead face and quickly moved on. He passed the stabbed S2 engine and it’s legs where they had snapped in half, its feet and shins still jutting out of the ground while the rest of its body lie on the ground. As he circled its back, an unfamiliar clean tube was sticking out of the back of its neck. Shinji swallowed, that was an entry plug, maybe jostled open from the fall.  
The clean shine of the entry plug contrasted with the tarnished Eva it came from. Shinji wondered briefly how such a thing was possible, but so much about the world he came from and the one he now inhabited escaped him that he no longer cared about what made sense. It would kill him to understand it all. 

As he approached the plug a word in english caught his attention. It was mandatory for him to understand English letters, he learned some in school, but that didn’t mean he remembered everything. As he came closer and closer his mind worked its hardest to process the letters in front of him. 

“Dam.. Du” he murmured, sounding out the English, “Dum-Dummy!” He didn’t even try to read the last part. That was a dummy plug he was looking at. It was dark red with black letters printed on its side. These letters were romaji and much easier for Shinji to understand. The veneer of stillness he used to cover himself broke open in an instant. 

Shinji bounded forward and climbed onto the plug, looking for some kind of opening. Considering its permanent contents there was little need for an easy to access entrance but the persistent Shinji found a latch between the ‘W’ and ‘O’ of Kaworu’s name. A warm blast of air shot out of the plug’s tiny door and immediately Shinji could smell the familiar aroma of LCL and blood. His stomach turned painfully and all the bones in his body reverberated with sick anticipation. 

He was straddling the plug with the door open in-between his legs and when he peered inside the dark entrance he couldn’t see any of that orange soup floating around in there. What he could remember about the system was that the plugs were filled with LCL and a soul. Rei in NERV’s and apparently Kaworu in these. But there was none, just the lingering scent of it. 

Empty. Shinji closed his eyes in defeat, breathing in through his suddenly burning mouth and sighing, resting his forehead on the opened door. Silently he sat on the plug, disappointed in himself for wishing the impossible true. Shinji decided it was best to close the hatch and move along but when he opened his eyes to peer straight down into the plug a white hand and wrist lay at the bottom, the arm it was attached too disappearing into the darkness. 

Immediately Shinji jumped and hit his head against the door, letting go of it and slamming it shut. He jumped at that noise and almost fell off, but he righted himself and shot a hand at the door’s handle with an iron grip. He paused again. Was it really a hand he saw, maybe he was dreaming again? The silence was broken by the sound of a sigh from inside the plug. 

With a heart pounding in his head Shinji had a difficult time trying to calm down. He was stalling, he didn’t want to see what was inside, even if…

Shinji opened the latch again, the pale limb was still there, only now it slithered about at the bottom of the plug. The former pilot was scared witless, human movement was not meant to be so clear, it alone was his rippling reflection in a puddle of water or dusty in a broken storefront window, not alive with a mind of its own. The arm pulled itself into the light cast down from the waning moon, revealing a heavily bruised shoulder which lead to silver hair, now tinted pink in the light. Shinji almost bit his own tongue off.

“Kaworu!” he managed to bleat out, halting the progression of the body in the plug. Shinji reached down and touched the purple shoulder of his friend, but was met with a pained shriek. This time he did fall off the plug. Kaworu never screamed before, not even when he crushed the angel in his hand. 

It was such a surprise Shinji wondered if it had even happened, but with another peek into the dummy plug his suspicions were confirmed and indeed Kaworu was lying on the bottom of the plug, pulling himself around with his uninjured arms. 

“Kaworu,” he said again and the body paused before continuing to pull itself along, “Kaworu?” No response apart from its pause. Shinji swallowed a heavy, burning lump in his throat. From the light he could tell the body was naked and severely bruised across its midsection from its elbows to its neck and all the way down to its knees. Once it had made its way down to the end of the plug, the body turned around on its belly and began to circle back. 

It was unnerving how detached the creature was. Shinji wasn’t sure if he should call the clone an angel or a human or something in-between, but whatever the thing was at the bottom of the dummy plug, it looked human enough for Shinji to want. 

Minutes of painful screaming later, Kaworu was on the ground, face up and staring blankly into the sky. Shinji’s ears were ringing from all the noise the clone had made in its struggle; all in all it wasn’t very tough to drag the body out since it seemed to be in too much pain to fight back. Drool and tears flowed down the body’s pale face. It didn’t seem to remember that moments ago it had been wailing like a police siren for now it was stoic and unaware of the world. Shinji felt he could cry, for what, if anything, had he gained from this trauma. 

Shinji felt awkward and confused and exhausted suddenly and without looking back, ran away from the body, feeling over whelmed. There was another person on Earth but using the word ‘person’ for that thing was like describing the rock he now stood on as being the same ‘Earth’ he grew up in. Running away proved to be a good method to calm the teenager down and after a few minutes he was stabilized and returned to Kaworu’s body. It was breathing shallowly, no surprise given how broken and swollen its chest was. 

When Shinji called out Kaworu again there was the weakest twitch of a glance in the boy’s direction from the body, but Shinji was too busy staring at the lifeless ground to notice. He balled his hands into fist, clenching and unclenching them, trying to assess the situation. 

This Kaworu came from the Dummy Plug, just like those Reis had. But, if his fragile mind could recall correctly, the Reis within the tank had no souls, so this thing, this Kaworu from the plug, it had to have a soul. Quickly Shinji discredited the thought, there were no souls left on the earth, just his own. But still, the Evangelion Kaworu came from was part of Instrumentality, did that mean anything…

Defeated, the sole human being rest his head upon his dusty knees. Nothing made sense. It wasn’t worth the effort to chase an uncatchable conclusion. 

He looked up, chin on his knees, and studied the body. From what he could see, its back was beginning to darken with pooled blood, making the bruises on its chest bright yellow. Shinji felt himself fall ill at the sight; it was like a zombie, the way it breathed despite the injuries. The tears on its face had dried but its eyes were beginning to gloss over as if the end were nearing. 

Kaworu was dying again but Shinji didn’t care. He had gained so little from this nightmare; it would be a blessing for the retched thing to pass on. He was desperate for human contact but Kaworu was not a human, both in this form and the one he’d met before. 

Shinji watched silently as the body’s breathing slowed until all it could do was silently gasp for air like a landed fish. However, before its last breath the clone’s head twisted over, possibly from its muscles relaxing, to stare at Shinji with a look of pain oozing from its dying eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a couple years back, but never felt the need to post it. With Eva Q getting some interest I thought I would share some of my vaguely KawoShin work from back when I was deeeeep into End of Eva lore and whatever. The plan was to write Shinji interacting with a Kaworu from each of the dummy plugs. Who knows, I might if folks want it!


End file.
